The Last of the Landfillians:
Art, Romanticism, and the Albany Bulb
I must have been a child in the back seat of a station wagon, but I remember with stark clarity the sculpture located off the highway in the formerly barren strip of land that lay between the Bay Bridge and Berkeley. It was an art free of the usual trappings: no names; no titles; no extravagant materials. Just cast-off board and recycled trash crafted to look like animalistic forms rising from the marshy landscape. One couldn’t stop to examine it though. This was drive-by art, expressive of its time and place only; it was not intended to speak truths other than its own. Ephemeral, it would disappear either from the natural elements or from poaching. The next time one passed by it was gone. This strange and wondrous art spoke to my impressionable mind—it suggested other ways of being in the world.
The exhibition Refuge in Refuse: Homesteading Art and Culture resonates with this earlier era of junk art, eco art, and assemblage. It speaks to the California of the 1960s and 70s—a California that hatched communal experiments in living and birthed the defiant art of Jay Defeo, Bruce Conner, Robert Arneson, Wallace Berman, the feminist Womanhouse, and of course Nancy and Ed Kienholz. But this 2015 exhibition does not seek to place the work it presents on an art historical continuum. Rather, it brings together artists inspired by a place—an area of land known as the Bulb that juts into the San Francisco Bay. This unique site was used as a construction dump by the City of Albany from 1963 until 1983. After it closed individuals migrated to the Bulb seeking shelter: ultimately over sixty came to live there, calling themselves the landfillians. Many of the landfillians have hard life stories that include mental illness, deprivation, prison, addiction, and broken homes. Add to these misfortunes an indifferent government, as well as an increasingly corporate environment, and it is easy to understand how this community came into being. What is remarkable is that instead of dwelling on the circumstances that led them to the Bulb the landfillians built homes, a library, sculpture, an elaborate kitchen, literature, political tracts and a gym.
Aside from erecting architecture and sculpture from recycled materials the landfillians fabricated narratives from recycled myths. They took names, forged characters, and developed storylines from the detritus of Western culture. If this sounds like the American dream it is: as did the pilgrims, the landfillians created their own foundational myths. Tamara, for example, describes herself as the Wicked Witch of the West; there are hints of Robinson Crusoe and Lemuel Gulliver; there is a dog named Sugar Ray. In one photograph Boxer Bob punches the air atop his mansion. He looks heroic and he knows it.
I never visited the Bulb community and, unfortunately, it’s too late. The residents of the Bulb were evicted in April 2014 when the City of Albany voted to transfer the land to the California State Park System. The homes, resident’s art, and architectural sites were dismantled. Consequently I am a historian and the exhibition materials my primary material. I cannot speak form personal experience. This decisive event lends sharp poignancy to this exhibition, for it now speaks of a community past. The exhibition includes work by former landfillians—April Anthony, Catherine Cody, Danielle Evans, Jimbow the Hobow, Andy Kreamer, Phyl Lewis, Chester Mounton, and Amber Whitson, —as well as representations of the architectural and sculptural works that no longer exist. Here, the documentaries help preserve the memory of the Bulb and the artists who lived and worked there. On the other end of the spectrum, the exhibition includes the participation of those interested in mapping the Bulb community for posterity, as well as work inspired by the Bulb, such as paintings and sculpture by the SNIFF artists. Other artists in the exhibition include mobile showers and shelters for the homeless in San Francisco. The curators are aware of the diversity of work in the exhibition, and their outsider position as well. In their curatorial statement Robin Lasser, Danielle Siembieda, and Barbara Boissevain, who are also participating artists, lend order to this array of work by using the Bulb topography as a metaphor for collective participation. They write, “we are connecting and gathering vantage points from those who have a stake in the Bulb. We include ourselves in this ebb and flow. Having said that, the former residents of the Bulb had the most at stake, they made community, they considered this landfill their home.”
Those who love the Bulb are romantics in the historical sense of the term. They seek the sublime in spite of it all. One sees this in the work of landfillian Danielle Evans. Her paintings are filled with colorful flowers rising to meet a blue sky, suggesting a harmonious nature that is, at the same time, punctuated by the artist’s rough brushwork on raw board. The sense of beauty in the midst of scarcity is echoed in a diptych titled “Boxer Bob Wanders in Mansion Ruins” (2014) by Lasser. In the first image Boxer Bob wanders amidst his demolished mansion, only a blanket adorning his bare shoulders. In the second image he is gone but his possessions and a gorgeous sunset remain. In another diptych by Lasser we see Boxer Bob posing with Danielle on an “escape dock” that looks for all the world like Géricault’s Raft of Medusa. Such works offer a way to imagine living against the grain with dignity. Other works in the exhibition pierce the gossamer fabric of fantasy, thus emphasizing the fate that will ultimately embrace the Bulb. For example, Lasser and Siembieda’s signage, which places quotations from former Bulb residents on official-looking California State Park system plaques, operates as testament and warning. Mad Marc’s words are prophetic: “You are only as real as your dreams are. This net by the window, it went up to heaven, it was the size of a freight truck. It went around and around and caught all these fairies. That is why I call it the Fairy Castle and that is why no one can sleep in the castle.” The large 3D images of the once glorious sites at the Bulb by F3 and Associates have an oneiric feel as well, like spirit photographs depicting the passing of the Bulb from living site to memorial.
Like the 19th century romantics—such as the British poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, who expressed a sensual relation to a natural world that was disappearing under assault from industrialism—an intentional ambivalence imbues the art in this exhibition. The Bulb is shrouded in mystery while its sense of impermanence remains. And romanticism, mystifying as it may be, allows those who once lived at the Bulb to embrace the notion of “unleashed” nature—a term that crops up frequently in writing about the Bulb—while engaging in self-invention; and romanticism allows non-resident artists to take inspiration from such intrepid acts.
The disparate works in Refuge in Refuse: Homesteading Art and Culture coalesce around their common theme in a kaleidoscopic manner. Each artist contributes. No voice dominates. The artworks refract one another. This structure is symbolized by the mandalas by Judith Leinen and Lasser. Arranged portraits of the landfillians are repeated around a circular periphery. The mandalas take on a second life as discs for a zoetrope that sits atop a bicycle with plastic water bottles for feet. When the discs rotate the images become visual stories. Tamara Melts at Mad Marc’s Castle Window, Boxer Bob becomes Noah on his Arc, Grimm Salutes the Sunrise. The bicycle, perhaps the same bicycle used to gather scrap metal at the Bulb, becomes a dream machine waiting for its rider. While this artwork can’t bring the Bulb community back—nor can the maps, photographic images, oral histories, documentaries, paintings, signage, and texts—it retains the same spunky sensibility as the community that settled a small lot of land that lies sandwiched between an expanding city and a western sky.
Dore Bowen
January 1, 2015
Bio:
Dore Bowen is a writer, curator, and associate professor at San José State University. Forthcoming texts include “On the Site of Her Own Exclusion: Strategizing Queer Feminist Art History” in Sexual Differences and Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, eds. Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, Manchester University Press, and “Two Paths to Illumination in the 1825 Diorama” in Intermédialités. She is currently writing a book on the diorama.
Art, Romanticism, and the Albany Bulb
I must have been a child in the back seat of a station wagon, but I remember with stark clarity the sculpture located off the highway in the formerly barren strip of land that lay between the Bay Bridge and Berkeley. It was an art free of the usual trappings: no names; no titles; no extravagant materials. Just cast-off board and recycled trash crafted to look like animalistic forms rising from the marshy landscape. One couldn’t stop to examine it though. This was drive-by art, expressive of its time and place only; it was not intended to speak truths other than its own. Ephemeral, it would disappear either from the natural elements or from poaching. The next time one passed by it was gone. This strange and wondrous art spoke to my impressionable mind—it suggested other ways of being in the world.
The exhibition Refuge in Refuse: Homesteading Art and Culture resonates with this earlier era of junk art, eco art, and assemblage. It speaks to the California of the 1960s and 70s—a California that hatched communal experiments in living and birthed the defiant art of Jay Defeo, Bruce Conner, Robert Arneson, Wallace Berman, the feminist Womanhouse, and of course Nancy and Ed Kienholz. But this 2015 exhibition does not seek to place the work it presents on an art historical continuum. Rather, it brings together artists inspired by a place—an area of land known as the Bulb that juts into the San Francisco Bay. This unique site was used as a construction dump by the City of Albany from 1963 until 1983. After it closed individuals migrated to the Bulb seeking shelter: ultimately over sixty came to live there, calling themselves the landfillians. Many of the landfillians have hard life stories that include mental illness, deprivation, prison, addiction, and broken homes. Add to these misfortunes an indifferent government, as well as an increasingly corporate environment, and it is easy to understand how this community came into being. What is remarkable is that instead of dwelling on the circumstances that led them to the Bulb the landfillians built homes, a library, sculpture, an elaborate kitchen, literature, political tracts and a gym.
Aside from erecting architecture and sculpture from recycled materials the landfillians fabricated narratives from recycled myths. They took names, forged characters, and developed storylines from the detritus of Western culture. If this sounds like the American dream it is: as did the pilgrims, the landfillians created their own foundational myths. Tamara, for example, describes herself as the Wicked Witch of the West; there are hints of Robinson Crusoe and Lemuel Gulliver; there is a dog named Sugar Ray. In one photograph Boxer Bob punches the air atop his mansion. He looks heroic and he knows it.
I never visited the Bulb community and, unfortunately, it’s too late. The residents of the Bulb were evicted in April 2014 when the City of Albany voted to transfer the land to the California State Park System. The homes, resident’s art, and architectural sites were dismantled. Consequently I am a historian and the exhibition materials my primary material. I cannot speak form personal experience. This decisive event lends sharp poignancy to this exhibition, for it now speaks of a community past. The exhibition includes work by former landfillians—April Anthony, Catherine Cody, Danielle Evans, Jimbow the Hobow, Andy Kreamer, Phyl Lewis, Chester Mounton, and Amber Whitson, —as well as representations of the architectural and sculptural works that no longer exist. Here, the documentaries help preserve the memory of the Bulb and the artists who lived and worked there. On the other end of the spectrum, the exhibition includes the participation of those interested in mapping the Bulb community for posterity, as well as work inspired by the Bulb, such as paintings and sculpture by the SNIFF artists. Other artists in the exhibition include mobile showers and shelters for the homeless in San Francisco. The curators are aware of the diversity of work in the exhibition, and their outsider position as well. In their curatorial statement Robin Lasser, Danielle Siembieda, and Barbara Boissevain, who are also participating artists, lend order to this array of work by using the Bulb topography as a metaphor for collective participation. They write, “we are connecting and gathering vantage points from those who have a stake in the Bulb. We include ourselves in this ebb and flow. Having said that, the former residents of the Bulb had the most at stake, they made community, they considered this landfill their home.”
Those who love the Bulb are romantics in the historical sense of the term. They seek the sublime in spite of it all. One sees this in the work of landfillian Danielle Evans. Her paintings are filled with colorful flowers rising to meet a blue sky, suggesting a harmonious nature that is, at the same time, punctuated by the artist’s rough brushwork on raw board. The sense of beauty in the midst of scarcity is echoed in a diptych titled “Boxer Bob Wanders in Mansion Ruins” (2014) by Lasser. In the first image Boxer Bob wanders amidst his demolished mansion, only a blanket adorning his bare shoulders. In the second image he is gone but his possessions and a gorgeous sunset remain. In another diptych by Lasser we see Boxer Bob posing with Danielle on an “escape dock” that looks for all the world like Géricault’s Raft of Medusa. Such works offer a way to imagine living against the grain with dignity. Other works in the exhibition pierce the gossamer fabric of fantasy, thus emphasizing the fate that will ultimately embrace the Bulb. For example, Lasser and Siembieda’s signage, which places quotations from former Bulb residents on official-looking California State Park system plaques, operates as testament and warning. Mad Marc’s words are prophetic: “You are only as real as your dreams are. This net by the window, it went up to heaven, it was the size of a freight truck. It went around and around and caught all these fairies. That is why I call it the Fairy Castle and that is why no one can sleep in the castle.” The large 3D images of the once glorious sites at the Bulb by F3 and Associates have an oneiric feel as well, like spirit photographs depicting the passing of the Bulb from living site to memorial.
Like the 19th century romantics—such as the British poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, who expressed a sensual relation to a natural world that was disappearing under assault from industrialism—an intentional ambivalence imbues the art in this exhibition. The Bulb is shrouded in mystery while its sense of impermanence remains. And romanticism, mystifying as it may be, allows those who once lived at the Bulb to embrace the notion of “unleashed” nature—a term that crops up frequently in writing about the Bulb—while engaging in self-invention; and romanticism allows non-resident artists to take inspiration from such intrepid acts.
The disparate works in Refuge in Refuse: Homesteading Art and Culture coalesce around their common theme in a kaleidoscopic manner. Each artist contributes. No voice dominates. The artworks refract one another. This structure is symbolized by the mandalas by Judith Leinen and Lasser. Arranged portraits of the landfillians are repeated around a circular periphery. The mandalas take on a second life as discs for a zoetrope that sits atop a bicycle with plastic water bottles for feet. When the discs rotate the images become visual stories. Tamara Melts at Mad Marc’s Castle Window, Boxer Bob becomes Noah on his Arc, Grimm Salutes the Sunrise. The bicycle, perhaps the same bicycle used to gather scrap metal at the Bulb, becomes a dream machine waiting for its rider. While this artwork can’t bring the Bulb community back—nor can the maps, photographic images, oral histories, documentaries, paintings, signage, and texts—it retains the same spunky sensibility as the community that settled a small lot of land that lies sandwiched between an expanding city and a western sky.
Dore Bowen
January 1, 2015
Bio:
Dore Bowen is a writer, curator, and associate professor at San José State University. Forthcoming texts include “On the Site of Her Own Exclusion: Strategizing Queer Feminist Art History” in Sexual Differences and Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, eds. Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, Manchester University Press, and “Two Paths to Illumination in the 1825 Diorama” in Intermédialités. She is currently writing a book on the diorama.